Great design and cool graphics are important and we know this. A well designed website gives your visitors faith in your company and helps to convert visits or hits into real tangible business. There are very few elements in terms of graphics that have a great deal of impact on search engine results though…this you will find out as we explain…
OK so first of all when you are getting started on creating your website, you should already know which key phrases you ultimately want your website to appear for. You might have used Googles keyword tool to check out the search volumes for various phrases relating to your business, and chosen perhaps 3 or 4 of those phrases to concentrate on. Dont go crazy and try to create a website that appears for too many key phrases unless you want to spend months writing unique web content to back those phrases up. Be realsitic!
How to create a search engine friendly website!
So now that you know which key phrases you want to concentrate on, you can start to consider putting together your home page. Using your chosen HTML editor or website publishing platform you should begin with looking at the meta data in the head section of your HTML code. The head section of your code (in basic terms – a lot more can be done here but lets stick with the basics!) should consist of…
your page title like this …
This is the page title that is displayed at the very top of your visitors web browser and also the blue title that appears on Google’s SERP (search engine results page) a line for your chosen keywords like this …
Again, be realistic about your key phrases. If you are a Gas Fitter in Northampton for example, you should choose region specific key phrases like “gas engineer northampton”, or “heating northampton”, rather than say “gas”, “heating engineer”. Adding key phrases to your meta data doent carry much weight with a search engine on its own, but if correctly tied in to other aspects of your website is still good practice.
a line for your website description like this …Make this sound human and try to include your most important key phrases.
There is a great deal more that you can do with the head section of your website and meta data including location, redirection and loads more. Next time we’ll take a look at the body of your website, tagging images and choosing the correct heading tags
etc. Stay tuned…